Gary Clapton Viv Cree and Mark Smith University of Edinburgh

1. Towards a critical history of child
protection social work
Gary Clapton, Viv Cree and Mark
Smith, University of Edinburgh

2. Introduction
• Absence of Welfare State (19th century)
• Welfare State (20th
century)
• Disappearing Welfare State, Individualism
combined with Child Protection
‘Authoritarianism’ (21st
century)

3. A social and economic history of child
protection
130 year-long period characterised firstly by rise and fall
and rise again of ‘big’ children’s charities
• 1880s Confidence: children rescued, parents blamed:
The NSPCC locate the root cause of abuse in the
abusive parents’ failure to feel proper regard for their
children rather than in the parents’ necessity (for child
begging)
• 1960s Crisis: existential and financial crises
• 2015 Certitude: return to child rescue and parent blaming
(internet use, childhood obesity)?

4. A social and economic history of child
protection #2
And period also characterised, secondly, by the rise of the role of
local government:
• 1948 Children’s Departments
• Late 1950s – 1973 The short summer of progressive Children and
Family Social Work?
The expansion of the Welfare State produced a generation of social
workers committed to challenging structural inequalities, liberal
values, radicalism, but also, crucially, progressive legislation (1963
Children and Young Person Act, Social Work (Scotland) 1968 and
resources dedicated to preventative children and family work.
1948 – early 1970s:‘The high water mark of social work’s reforming
potential’

5. 20th
/21st
Century Child Protection a
state of constant panic and exhaustion
‘A sense of crisis has been almost perpetual
since 1973’ (Parton)
‘Signal events’
• 1973 Maria Colwell: ‘We have lived with an
increasing sense of ‘moral panic’ ever since’
(Parton)
• 1986 Jasmine Beckford: rise of rule of
pessimism? (Clapton et al 2013)

6. 20th
/21st
Century Child Protection: a
state of constant panic and exhaustion
#2
• 1987 and 1990 Cleveland and Orkney
• 2000 Sarah Payne, The NSPCC and the News of the
World’s summit on paedophiles, ban Brass Eye spoof
(NSPCC)
• 2003 Brief return of family support: ‘It is not possible
to separate the protection of children from wider
support to families’, Laming Report, 2003 1.30)

7. 20th
/21st
Century Child Protection: a
state of constant panic and exhaustion
#3
• But, 2004, Every Child Matters: ‘wholesale lack of
trust in parents’ (Munro)
• 2007 Death of Peter Connolly confirms increased
emphasis on such lack of trust and, child rescue
• 2015 A Perfect Storm of Anxieties, Panic and Moral
Panics: Yewtree>Historic Sexual Abuse, Social Media
dangers. The net ever-widens.

8. 20th
/21st
Century Child Protection: a
state of constant panic and exhaustion
#4
‘There are increasing pressures on social workers to
do more with less, burn-out and disillusionment is
expressed in high vacancy and turn-over rates and
practice is suffering from a rise of cynicism among
state social workers and what has been described as
a ‘coarsening of attitudes’ (Clapton et al, 2013)
‘a child protection culture mired in muscular
authoritarianism towards multiply deprived families’
(Featherstone et al)

9. 20th
/21st
Century Child Protection: a
state of constant panic and exhaustion
#5
(English) ‘Workers paid comparatively little attention
to the causes of difficulties, and concentrated on
immediate or long term 'solutions'. English social
workers stressed the importance of individual
parental responsibility, and confronting parents with
their deficits in this area. Adoption and long term
fostering were conceived of as legitimate substitutes
for life with birth parents, not merely as
alternatives.’ (Cooper)

10. Is reform possible or is ‘child rescue’ a
doomed project?
The return of rescue
‘Social workers, their managers and other
professionals should always consider the plan
from the child’s perspective. A desire to think
the best of adults and to hope they can
overcome their difficulties should not trump
the need to rescue children from chaotic,
neglectful and abusive homes. (HM
Government (2013, emphasis added)

11. Is reform possible or is ‘child rescue’ a
doomed project?#2
… protection involves a very different conception of the
relationship between an individual or group, and others than
does care. Caring seems to involve taking the concerns and
needs of the other as the basis for action. Protection
presumes the bad intentions and harm that the other is likely
to bring to bear against the self or group and to require a
response to that potential harm. Protection can also become
self-serving, turning into what Judith Hicks Stein calls “the
protection racket” in which the need for protection reinforces
itself. (Tronto 1994: 104-05)

12. Is reform possible or is ‘child rescue’ a
doomed project?#3
No evidence that public care reduces harm (Ritchie)
State makes a lousy parent (Sutherland)
‘Furthermore, a lesson from that period (1970s and
1980s) was the importance of recognising secondary
or system abuse. This lesson seems to have been
forgotten by the cheerleaders for removal today’
(Featherstone et al, 2013).

13. Is reform possible or is ‘child rescue’ a
doomed project#4
Parton
• There is something in the cultural, political
and institutional contexts of child protection…
which means it might prove very difficult to
move things forward…’
• Social work and child protection (failure) seem
to be tied together by an umbilical cord.

14. Another social work? 21st
Enlightenment values versus Victorian
ideas
‘Children are not free-floating individuals. However
tempting it looks in the face of another tragedy,
there is no easy moral mandate to rescue more and
more children from impoverished families and
communities. We need to understand and work with
the relational ties of blood, kin, friendship, place and
community. These are the primary contexts for the
resolution of children's needs’ (Featherstone et al,
2014).

15. Another social work? 21st
Enlightenment values versus Victorian
ideas#2
The Empire (‘3rd
World’ social work) to strike back?
Community Social Work: Savings clubs and local
employment and labour-exchange circles and other
community actions... Social work education needs to
renew its emphasis on training social workers in
negotiating with the utility companies, housing
departments, loan companies and the welfare
agencies that the most impoverished are regular in
struggle with; accompanying this should come a
thorough knowledge of the benefits systems.

16. Another social work? 21st
Enlightenment values versus Victorian
ideas#3
Instead of exporting a failed child protection project to the
rest of the world, social work needs to adopt the more
pedagogical practices of European and elsewhere in which
advice-sharing and mentoring are privileged over more
deficit-driven approaches.
Social work thinking needs to rediscover scepticism,
radicalism (private troubles/public issues) and renew its
moral compass informed by the realities of most of the
children and families with whom we practice today…

17. Thank You.